We rarely upgrade our phones or MacBooks because the newer version can do something the previous one literally couldn’t. Often it’s the efficiency, speed, battery life, etc, combined, that lets us push the hardware further.

I get your point, but we can only have groundbreaking leaps once in a blue moon. That doesn’t mean incremental improvements aren’t useful.

What you were describing our products at the top or near the top of their S curve. That only works if a product has achieved a mature market that's big enough to sustain further product development. Apple might take a percentage point of market share from Windows, and Linux might take a 10th of a point, but nobody is suddenly going to find, or lose, a big chunk of the market.

The problem frontier LLMs face is that they are hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars short of finding that market that's big enough to sustain capex commitments and further product development. If they don't find something groundbreaking, they are going to have a very painful year next year, maybe even starting this year for some of them and their data center partners.

Anthropic and OpenAI can't afford to live in a world where LLMs are at or near the top of their S curve.